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DNC Leaked emails are not interesting, but a plagiarized paragraph by Trump's wife is interesting?

Are you saying that politicians and political parties do not wield power and influence and do nothing to influence the media? The main purpose of politics is to wield power and influence, and the media is core to this. Are you saying that media is unbiased despite the fact that they are on record contributing to particular candidates' campaigns, e.g. Time Warner (CNN) being one of Clinton's top contributors?

You are either burying your head in the sand, or you are part of the misinformation campaign yourself.

Edit: I'm being downvoted pretty heavily on this, but I'm not entirely sure why. I didn't even mention Trump's wife.

DNC Leaked emails are not interesting, but a plagiarized paragraph by Trump's wife is interesting?

Hu? The DNC email leaks are much more interesting than the plagiarized paragraph in Melania Trump. Neither are particularly interesting in the scheme of things though.

The plagiarized paragraph shows that the Trump campaign isn't very well organized. I think most knew that.

The DNC emails show that the DNC favored Hillary as a candidate. We knew that too - they did in 2008 when Obama beat her.

Are you saying that politicians and political parties do not wield power and influence and do nothing to influence the media? The main purpose of politics is to wield power and influence, and the media is core to this. Are you saying that media is unbiased despite the fact that they are on record contributing to particular candidates' campaigns, e.g. Time Warner (CNN) being one of Clinton's top contributors?

No I'm not(!!)

I'm saying that reading the malware listing of Wikileaks by Google as some kind of Democratic party conspiracy is wrong.

I'm saying I don't know much about Reddit.

I'm saying that in my professional opinion (I work in area) there are multiple possible explanations for the Twitter hashtag thing.

I'm also (now) saying that the three things are unrelated. It is extremely temping to conflate multiple independent things and see things that aren't there.

The DNC emails show that the DNC actively nurtured relationships with reporters that went against the basics of journalistic ethics. They show that the DNC coordinated with the Hillary campaign to come up with good anti-Bernie stunts (planting an audience member to, i.e., ask if he believed in God). They show a consistent and far-reaching effort not just to "favor" Hillary, as you say, but to ensure that she would win -- whether by bullying the press, planning "counter" events, or propagating narratives about the Sanders campaign being weak and disorganized.

This is in direct violation of the DNC charter:

In the conduct and management of the affairs and procedures of the Democratic National Committee, particularly as they apply to the preparation and conduct of the Presidential nomination process, the Chairperson shall exercise impartiality and evenhandedness as between the Presidential candidates and campaigns. The Chairperson shall be responsible for ensuring that the national officers and staff of the Democratic National Committee maintain impartiality and evenhandedness during the Democratic Party Presidential nominating process.

This is far more interesting than Munich or Tim Kaine.

Well, "interesting..." Is it more interesting than the fact that the candidate can't follow secrecy rules? Is it more interesting than the fact that those rules are so unreasonable that it's been decades-long implied policy to ignore them? Is it more more interesting than the much more blatant partiality in the only opposition party when it comes to picking candidates (not that I blame them)?

So, the DNC was caught politicking. It's perhaps not very nice, but is it surprising? Is it illegal? Is it particularly egregious? Frankly, if the worst they did was prefer clinton over sanders, they've got surprisingly little dirty laundry (or, more plausibly: they don't email about particularly questionable ideas).

None of this sounds like a conspiracy; it sounds like business as usual, and rather boring at that - at least to most people. If you're in a position to affect the composition of the DNC, perhaps it's little more relevant. And if you support(ed) Sanders, you might feel justifiably angry (although planting audience members to ask questions that are bound to come up in the election proper anyhow doesn't really strike me as high up the scale of nastiness). And of course, perhaps there's something else in those mails that is newsworthy.

This is pretty much my position.

I think it is worth noting that the Clintons have been deeply involved in the Democratic party for a long, long time, so it isn't awfully surprising there are personal relationships there.

The other thing I'd note that all this was also true when Obama ran against Clinton.

(I've noted elsewhere I'm not a Hillary supporter and that I'd have liked more candidates in the race)

"The plagiarized paragraph shows that the Trump campaign isn't very well organized. I think most knew that."

Compared to who? Hillary's #stealthebern campaign or the 2007/8 plagiarism scandals with Obama? Joe Biden has some serious scandals as well.

If the media weren't pushing a certain angle, all these scandals would have been kept in context. Instead one line from a politician's wife's speechwriter now means he's running a "campaign that isn't very well organized."

The line from the speech was just an example that underlined how little staffing Trump has.

I think it is pretty widely recognized that his staff isn't experienced, and there are very few of them compared to a usual campaign. If you don't agree, I understand that we are talking partisan politics, so I'm unlikely to convince you.

Perhaps consider listening to some political wonk podcasts and you hear how amazed they are at how the convention was run. Things like calling Fox during one of his speaker's speeches, not knowing what multiple speakers were saying, and the whole thing with the VP rollout: http://www.vox.com/2016/7/15/12199676/trump-vp-pence-rollout

Mitt Romney's convention was nothing like this, nor was any other convention from either side of politics.

It isn't really surprising - he isn't exactly from the core of the Republican party, so he hasn't been able to rely on people just doing what they always do. That's a quite reasonable explanation, but it doesn't deny the facts of his disorganized campaign.

Now it may well work out fine - a lot of things that people thought were important are tuning out not to be.

Vox/Salon are not a credible sources on anything Republican. That's like using Fox News as a reliable news source for Democrats.

And yet, Trump is basically tied with Hillary in the polls. Even when she is vastly outspending Trump, and overly out-staffing Trump, Hillary still can't beat Trump in the polls. In fact, in some polls, Trump is well ahead of her.

What does this really says about Trump's efficiency compare to Hillary?

> The alternative interpretation is that the #DNCLeaks don't seem very interesting.

The e-mails contain details of strategic political planning on the part of the DNC, and although there doesn't seem to be much in the way of nefarious behavior described within, there is frank discussion of political strategy in dry terms that will damage the DNC's (and thus Hillary's) image even though this is how all political organizations operate. Unfortunately for Hillary, there is no RNC e-mail leak, so "this is how all political organizations work" won't be a sufficient defense in the wake of this leak and you can be assured that the conservative media is going to frame the content within these e-mails as cynically as possible. There is also the possibility that there is something legitimately damning yet to be uncovered.

I agree with this, and I think it's a pretty fair assessment.

I'm not sure if that means that it should or shouldn't be a trending hashtag on Twitter.

I do know that I'm a somewhat wonkish follower of politics and didn't really find them that interesting. I would imagine that "interesting" should be something that trending hashtags should optimize for? I complete concede this is a personal opinion though.

I'm not saying this particular theory is true. It's probably a mistake.

I'm just saying that it's completely reasonable to be suspicious and ask questions, however, given that we have definitive proof that Google is known to work with the government.

"Work with government" means lots of things.

The NSA leaks proved that the NSA hacked Google's network infrastructure. That isn't exactly "working with the government".

There are other things where Google does work with the US and other governments. I believe they pass Flu Trends data to the CDC for example....

And which government branch do you think that Google is working with here?

The #DNCLeaks thing is a anti-Hillary story, promoted mostly by bitter Bernie Sanders promoters. There are some Trump supporters jumping on too, but they seem a minority. It's inside-baseball for DNC wonks.

I could see an argument that someone at Google is a Hillary Clinton supporter and therefore took it on themselves to take it down. That would be a dumb thing to do, but at least would make sense.

But which government branch would try to get Google to do it? The White House wouldn't be so stupid - it would leak in an instant. Some secret three-letter agency? Why would they care? Some other department?

You can't call something an "anti-Hillary story" if it's an uneditorialized dump of emails. Of course it's mostly Bernie supporters pushing it: the leaks show the DNC worked against Bernie while colluding with Hillary's camp.

Hillary and her supporters won't talk about it because it favors them, the DNC won't because they violated bylaws requiring impartiality, and the media won't report because the leak shows they've been taking orders from the DNC.

You can't call something an "anti-Hillary story" if it's an uneditorialized dump of emails. Of course it's mostly Bernie supporters pushing it: the leaks show the DNC worked against Bernie while colluding with Hillary's camp.

I think we mostly agree here? By the "#DNCLeak story" I mean the analysis of the emails as well as the leak itself - that's what is happening under that hashtag.

the media won't report because the leak shows they've been taking orders from the DNC.

The only thing I've seen on this is the "Chuck, this must stop" email. It's pretty clear that was a wish, not an order (otherwise why the follow up call). Anyone who's watched any political drama on TV has seen how often politicians offices call journalists to complain - I don't see much different here?

Also, the media is reporting the leaks, pretty heavily. The NY Times[1] and CNN[2] amongst plenty of others both have major stories.

I think I agree with everything else you say.

(If it matters, I don't think Hillary is a great candidate, and wouldn't class myself as a supporter. I would have liked to see a much broader set of candidates in the Democratic race.)

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/23/us/politics/dnc-emails-san...

[2] http://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/22/politics/dnc-wikileaks-ema...

Presidential candidates used to be nominated by party insiders. The primary system was supposed to allow the voters to choose democratic and republican candidates.

It's been pretty clear this election that the Democratic Party has gone back to the old way. I don't personally object that much because I don't vote democrat, but it's not just "inside baseball". My guess is that you don't want to hear about it because you are rooting for the democrats.

> The NSA leaks proved that the NSA hacked Google's network infrastructure.

.

Total misinformation. They WORKED with the NSA. Do you not remember the PRISM program?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

You really should stop spreading ignorance and misinformation. You should also disclose that you work in the National Security industry, at a Palantir equivalent in Australia.

Citation? Nothing there says Google worked with the government. In fact, the article has Google saying the opposite. The slides just say "direct access" with no clarification.

Can you point me to exactly what you're reading that indicates Google worked with the NSA ?

You're joking right? This was national news when this was revealed.

You obviously didn't read the link: "The PRISM program collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies such as Google Inc. under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms."

Anyone care to elaborate why I'm being downvoted?

I didn't downvote you but if you read the comments guidelines[0] they are helpful and cover some of the comments you made above.

As an aside, your profile says you signed up 1337 days ago and your karma is at 1358. Another 21 down-votes and your Hacker News profile page will looking pretty leet - I say go for it. Remember, it's just fake internet points, you can't spend them or do anything interesting with them.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

On Reddit you can actually sell your Internet Points. Apparently spammers like to get high-karma accounts for spamming purposes.

Obeying the law is not "working with"

The previous accusation was that Google was hacked and unaware that PRISM was collecting data, which is what I was referring to. Please read the thread before commenting.

OK well in that case every person/company in the country "works with" the USG since they comply with some laws/demands.

Google initially denied that they complied with the usage of PRISM, until documentation showed they were lying. Apple held out longer than Google, so at some point they all had to decide that they were going to "work" with the USG.

Please give me an exact citation. Perhaps update Wikipedia while you're at it?

I've never edited wikipedia, but my understanding is that it is labor intensive. I'll just provide a citation here:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/19/us-tech-giants...

The words "mandatory" and "compulsory" figure prominently in that article.

From what I understand they had front door access, but the NSA wiretapped between datacenters.

Google engineers issue 'fuck you' to NSA over surveillance scandal http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/6/5072924/google-engineers-i...

So I think that the story around PRISM specifically is a bit confused. PRISM was initially reported as mass collection of data by the NSA, and Google has repeatedly denied that they took part in that. They do co-operate with targeted national security letter investigations, and with police with warrants, but they are known to challenge both. Quoting the page you linked to:

Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a backdoor for the government to access private user data. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users' internet activity on such a scale is completely false.

Here is some details about the hack the NSA did on Google's infrastructure: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...

You should also disclose that you work in the National Security industry, at a Palantir equivalent in Australia.

Wow! This made me laugh. We fund (and sometimes work on ourselves!) research on things like contagious disease prediction, and things like trying to understand mass social actions like elections. Yes, it is national security related, but not exactly that kind of national security! Sometimes the same agencies are involved though - for example, the same agency provides disease alert advice to government as provides political instability advice. So I guess maybe that makes me untrustworthy or something?

I can talk to you at great depth about Dengue Fever modelling and possible ways to try to derive parameters for mosquito breeding models if you like - it's pretty interesting, and maybe that would help some?

> The NSA leaks proved that the NSA hacked Google's network infrastructure. That isn't exactly "working with the government".

A Guardian article from September 2013, two-or-so-months after the Snowden leaks: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/nsa-prism-cost...

> The National Security Agency paid millions of dollars to cover the costs of major internet companies involved in the Prism surveillance program after a court ruled that some of the agency's activities were unconstitutional, according to top-secret material passed to the Guardian.

> While the ruling did not concern the Prism program directly, documents passed to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden describe the problems the decision created for the agency and the efforts required to bring operations into compliance. The material provides the first evidence of a financial relationship between the tech companies and the NSA.

> An NSA newsletter entry, marked top secret and dated December 2012, discloses the huge costs this entailed. "Last year's problems resulted in multiple extensions to the certifications' expiration dates which cost millions of dollars for Prism providers to implement each successive extension – costs covered by Special Source Operations," it says.

> An earlier newsletter, which is undated, states that the Prism providers were all given new certifications within days of the Fisa court ruling. "All Prism providers, except Yahoo and Google, were successfully transitioned to the new certifications. We expect Yahoo and Google to complete transitioning by Friday 6 October."

Google only gave a bla-bla answer when asked about it:

> Google did not answer any of the specific questions put to it, and provided only a general statement denying it had joined Prism or any other surveillance program. It added: "We await the US government's response to our petition to publish more national security request data, which will show that our compliance with American national security laws falls far short of the wild claims still being made in the press today."

I'd say that you should revisit your believes when it comes to the relationship between the NSA and big SV companies.

> I'm not saying this particular theory is true. It's probably a mistake.

So why are you repeating it? (It sounds like you don't even think it's true. What the use in repeating it, then?)

> I'm just saying that it's completely reasonable to be suspicious and ask questions, however, given that we have definitive proof that Google is known to work with the government.

"I'm just saying...". Well, at least it's a step up from "I'm just asking!".

Look, suspicion of government and authority (and media probably moreso) is generally speaking a good default, but if you're throwing concrete allegations about you need to have some concrete evidence of wrongdoing. Otherwise it's just scaremongering or conspiracy theory.

The dnc creating fake ads for employment @ jobs@trump.com was funny and disturbing. The satirical take was funny, but it also has a swatting kind of vibe to it. IMHO, some of the emails were disturbing. learning how the sausage is made is eye opening.